A New Year's Eve I'd completely forgotten

When I was on my way home from work after my night shift the call-in topic of the morning show I was listening to on the radio was about most memorable New Year's Eves... for all the wrong reasons. As I headed my car down the hill by the university I started thinking about that, and this memory surfaced...

It began on the day before New Year's Eve, 1970 when we were living in Alsask. Around lunchtime the phone rang; it was a woman who worked as a waitress in the hotel bar where Mom was a waitress in the dining room. She wanted to know if I would babysit her little boy while she and her husband drove a transportation-less couple (our next door neighbours the Nowans) into Kindersley to have their baby. I'd never worked for them before although I had a large clientele for my babysitting services. I already had a job lined up for New Year's Eve but that was more than a day away, so I was only too happy to make a little more money. How long could it take to drive someone into Kindersley anyway?

Little did I know they'd planned to stay with the other couple until the baby arrived, first babies usually took their sweet time doing that and it would be many hours before I returned home.

I walked the short distance to the Gauthiers' house with a book and a roll of Lifesavers in my pocket. The couple was in a hurry to leave so they gave me some brief instructions about their toddler and his routine. Oh, and the dog had been spayed the day before and was still a little sedated, but she'd be fine... And away they went.

The dog was a huge Newf with a white blaze on her chest that made her look like a Himalayan black bear; she was solidly sleeping it off in the front hallway. I'd never seen a dog that large and was more than a little scared of her. The little boy was at the age where he made strange so when he woke from his nap he took one look at me and began to scream. Between trying to calm the child and my dreading the moment when the gi-normous dog regained consciousness, my stomach was in knots. When the Gauthiers hadn't returned by suppertime I scrounged around and fed the baby. A couple of hours later I broke down and helped myself to some of their groceries. A while later I put the baby to bed and settled in to watch TV. I had a choice between CFQC (CTV) from Saskatoon, French CBC and CFCN (CTV) Calgary. With rabbit ears. And LOTS of snow. I struggled to stay awake; it was a point of honour for me that I never fell asleep when I babysat. I was not being paid to sleep, after all. I was completely fine with both the baby and the dog remaining asleep, however!

Somewhere in the middle of the night the baby woke me up. He settled back down to sleep and I curled up in the by-now-chilly living room with a blanket and my book. The dog slumbered on. I don't think she had moved at all in all the hours I'd been there, although she was definitely breathing - I could hear her from across the room. I dozed off several more times, shaking myself awake each time, mortified in case the Gauthiers would come home and find me sawing logs. I needn't have worried. They returned around noon with the news that Sue Nowan had given birth to a boy that morning and both mom and baby were fine. I grabbed the $10 they gave me and sprinted for home and bed.

That night I walked over to the Wiazeks at the appointed time. I was torn between pretending that I'd had a good night's sleep and would be my usual highly responsible self and telling them the whole story about the night before. In the end I told them, and Mrs Wiazek was so nice, she told me it would be just fine if I was asleep when they came home. If I wanted to I could just sleep over. (I was SO relieved!!) In the end I chose to go home to my own bed at 2 am when they came home; Mr Wiazek drove me home, something that NEVER happened on that tiny radar station but totally welcomed that night.

Oh, yeah... what about the dog? She woke up not long after the sun came up, stretched mightily, groaned a bit, ambled to the back door and gave me a look that said, "Lemme out NOW!" When she came back in she went back to her rug in the front hall and promptly went back to sleep. She had no intention of eating me, which was absolutely fine with me.

Ah yes... the beach party at Loggieville...

That summer that I was fifteen, my cohorts at Teen Town planned and executed a beach party on the shores of the Miramichi river, down the road from Chatham and almost to the Strait of Northumberland. The water there is never warm, but that doesn't matter to a bunch of teenagers, and there was a rather nice beach there, so we had all the elements of a lot of fun.

I was much more self-conscious back then than I am now and wouldn't have been caught dead in a swim suit. (I didn't even wear shorts until I was about 30!) I was probably the only one on the beach wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, but that was okay with me. The other girls were decked out in their skimpy bikinis or halter tops and cut-offs. For a change the weather actually cooperated with our plans and the sun shone brightly.

What makes this event so memorable for me was the curiously bizarre situation that led to me becoming a drug trafficker for the day. Sort of. I was one of the kids who was not paired off at that point in time and so I spent some of the afternoon strolling along the beach with Paul Pennimpede. We came across evidence of someone riding a horse down the beach a few days earlier. This evidence was above the high-water line and was quite dried out. I jokingly suggested to Paul that we might convince someone that it was some other form of vegetative material... if it was presented correctly we might fool them into thinking it was marijuana. (Goes to show just how much I knew about marijuana! And how warped my mind was then... not that it's any less warped now.) Anyhow, Paul mooched some Vogue rolling papers from one of the other guys and then rolled a couple of "joints" from the horse manure. On our stroll back up the beach the first person we came to, Paul Farrell, took the bait. To this day I can't believe that happened because of all our crowd, Paul was the MOST familiar with horses and their effluent. His dad owned two race horses that were stabled in Chatham; Paul was responsible for their day-to-day care. But he was hornswoggled into believing that we'd given him a real joint. He fired that doobie up and took a huge toke. Then he coughed really hard before saying, in a tight and breathless voice, "That's some GOOD shit!" My partner in crime and I nearly turned blue trying not to laugh our behinds off. I don't recall if we ever came clean about the origin of the shit, but I do remember how funny it was to see Paul smoking it!

And that's the story of how I was a pusher-for-a-day.

The October Crisis... as seen through the eyes of a 12 year old

As if the notion of missiles from Russia wasn't scary enough, in October 1970 the relative safety and security of all Canadians seemed to be threatened from within. On October 5, the Front de Liberation du Quebec kidnapped a British diplomat named James Cross in Montreal. This represented an abrupt escalation of terrorist activity by the FLQ which until then had satisfied itself largely with blowing up mailboxes in the affluent Anglo neighbourhood of Westmount. I was 12 and only just developing an interest in current affairs outside of my own realm of awareness. The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and the grainy, fuzzy black and white images on Channel 7 were my sources of information. Sketchy and vaguely understood.

While Quebec was physically very far away, we had only just left there to move to Alsask. A 12 year-old's understanding of such things as terrorism in 1970 was very different from that of the modern 12 year old whose exposure to CNN, the Internet and other sources of information are a quantum leap ahead. I struggled to connect the events in Montreal to the reality of my own world and came up short.

On October 8 all media outlets in Canada broadcast the FLQ's manifesto, a rambling and incoherent jumble of demands. Transcripts of the translation read in part:

"The Front de Libération du Québec wants total independence for Quebeckers; it wants to see them united in a free society, a society purged for good of its gang of rapacious sharks, the big bosses who dish out patronage and their henchmen, who have turned Quebec into a private preserve of cheap labour and unscrupulous exploitation.

The Front de Libération du Québec is not an aggressive movement, but a response to the aggression organized by high finance through its puppets, the federal and provincial governments (the Brinks farce ¹, Bill 63, the electoral map ², the so-called "social progress" tax ³, the Power Corporation, medical insurance - for the doctors ⁴, the guys at Lapalme ⁵...)

We have had enough of promises of work and of prosperity, when in fact we will always be the diligent servants and bootlickers of the big shots, as long as there is a Westmount, a Town of Mount Royal, a Hampstead, an Outremont, all these veritable fortresses of the high finance of St. James Street and Wall Street; we will be slaves until Quebeckers, all of us, have used every means, including dynamite and guns, to drive out these big bosses of the economy and of politics, who will stoop to any action however low it may be, the better to screw us.

We live in a society of terrorized slaves, terrorized by the big bosses, Steinberg, Clark, Bronfman, Smith, Neopole, Timmins, Geoffrion, J.L. Lévesque, Hershorn, Thompson, Nesbitt, Desmarais, Kierans (next to these, Rémi Popol the Nightstick, Drapeau the Dog, Bourassa the Simards' Simple Simon and Trudeau the Pansy ¹⁷ are peanuts!)."

Vive le Quebec Libre.

http://english.republiquelibre.org/Manifesto-flq.html

On October 10, another FLQ group, the Chenier cell, kidnapped the Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte from his front lawn, an act that was witnessed by his nephew. A week later, one day after le Premier-Ministre Robert Bourassa asked Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act, Laporte's body was found stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car near the airport at St Hubert. The safety and well-being of Mr Cross was unknown but his captors were insistent that his release was dependent on the fulfillment of their demands for the release of "political prisoners" being held for terrorist activity by the Quebec police.

Since we lived on a Canadian military radar station, it was thought that our little community could be a target for terrorist attack. We were all kept in a state of high alert and the army was called in to ensure our safety. We were instructed to inform our parents or teachers of any suspicious strangers we might see lurking around our homes or school; since there were only 124 houses on the station and a couple dozen in the village, strangers would have stuck out like a sore thumb and we viewed it as a game. We kids really had no idea of how serious all of this was. In retrospect, we were protected from the reality of it all by the adults in our world, a job that is all but impossible today. At the time, this was our 9-11 but we didn't know it.

On November 6, the QPF raided the headquarters of the Chenier cell of the FLQ; most of the members scattered but Bernard Lortie was arrested and charged in the kidnapping and murder of Pierre Laporte. It was nearly another month before British Trade Commissioner James Cross was released on December 3, at the same time that 5 high-ranking members of the FLQ were granted safe passage to Cuba. On December 28, the last 3 Chenier cell members to be arrested were finally caught in a 6 meter long tunnel in a farmer's field in St-Luc. They too were charged in the Pierre Laporte kidnap-murder case.

These events had far-reaching effects: popularity for the violent FLQ waned allowing the growth of the politically-active Parti Quebecois and its subsequent rise to power as the ruling party in 1976 and the creation of the Bloc Quebecois at the federal level following the failure of the Meech Lake Accord. Strong criticism of the federal invocation of the War Measures Act led to a rift in the Liberal party and the eventual success of the federal Conservatives under Bryan Mulroney.

When all is said and done, I'm happy that I was born when I was; by the time the instant-communication revolution had occurred I was already an adult and could cope with knowing of the evil man does unto man. The Challenger, the Gulf War, 9-11, Katrina, all these things that terrify our children and their children... We were protected from that. I wish we could extend that protection to the innocence of today.

Travels with my Dad

One facet of military dependency is the frequent moves necessitated by operational requirements. During the Cold War, most military families moved every two years or every three at most. And if you were posted into an isolated community, you had to request an extension of your posting if you wanted to be there more than two. Mont Apica was quite isolated, situated as it was in the middle of rural northern Quebec, so postings there were two years and few people asked to extend. That's how we found ourselves in the little Red Comet that Dad bought from Gely Bouchard, on the move to Alsask.

Anyone who has driven across northern Ontario will usually choose a different route the next time. Dad decided we would drive through the States to get past that stretch of nothingness and so there we were, rolling through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on an early August day in 1968. As the day neared its end, the weather turned inclement; we were tenting (our first foray with the huge green thing) so the parents thought we should look for a campgrounds early rather than risk being caught in the rain. Have you ever driven across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? There's a whole lot of nothing-but-trees there! So now it was dark, the three of us in the back seat were tired and hungry and the two in the front seat were wondering what they were going to do now.

Oh look... there's a state police car behind us and he's got his lights on... "Excuse me sir. Did you know you're driving with only one headlight? That's against the law in Michigan, sir. Oh, you're looking for a campground? What was wrong with the one a couple miles back? Yeah, umhmmm, there's one about five miles back. How 'bout I show you?" So Dad did a u-turn and we headed back the way we came. Sure enough there was a campground off the highway a piece, not that there were any campers there. Mom and Dad got out of the car and struggled in gale-force winds and teeming rain to erect the Green Monster. After about 10 minutes of incredible effort, they decided to take their chances with Smoky, and threw the tent back in the trunk. We'd spend the night in a motel, out of the elements, and we'd figure out how to pay for it later...

NO VACANCY. NO VACANCY. No motels for miles... by then it was really late, we'd been driving forever and the three in the back seat were sound asleep. Mom was sleeping too (she could sleep in a Leopard tank as it rolled over houses back then, I swear... but I suspect it was all the Gravol she needed just to keep her coffee down) so Dad looked for a place to pull over so he could catch a few winks.

Early the next morning we all woke up to discover that the parking lot Dad had pulled us into was next to a church. And it was Sunday. Everybody was curious about the little red car with the Quebec license plate and the fogged up windows. We looked out the windows to see the townsfolk looking in. I thought Mom would die of embarrassment. But it was just another Curry Caper, destined to be talked about at odd times when the mood to reminisce strikes. Like today!

Education takes many forms

Remember the story of moving the library? Well, there were other "educational" pursuits we carried out at John A Silver School that weren't technically approved by the Saskatchewan Board of Education. We learned a lot of things that were probably more useful through them however!

In 1971, the province of Saskatchewan threw a series of celebrations related to the signing of treaties that allowed European settlement of the grassland prairie eventually leading to the induction of the province into Confederation in 1905. Alsask was no exception to the celebratory mood. The radar station got into the act by incorporating Homecoming '71 into the annual winter carnival and by providing a lot of resources for the Homecoming Parade in the early summer.

One feature of the winter carnival was a snow sculpture competition. Individual families built them on their front yards and the four teams that the messes divvied into also created team sculptures in a central spot. In 1971, the students of John A Silver got involved too. We had the guys from Motor Support Equipment pile a bunch of snow on the playground closest to the kindergarten room, where we built a tipi and an aboriginal man sitting cross-legged in front of it smoking a pipe. We painted our sculpture with tempera paints from our art supplies and learned about the native Saskatchewan people while we worked. Well, didn't our sculpture win a special prize!!

We had SO much fun with the sculpture that we begged to be allowed to have a float in the parade. Mr Proud was a tough man to convince but in the end he relented. I'm sure we used an entire year's worth of industrial toilet paper to make the flowers we put on our float. There was a bit of a dilemma when it came to the fact that all our flowers were sort of a dingy not-quite- white, until someone suggested spray paint. We ended up with red, green and white toilet paper flowers that we stapled onto a sheet of plywood to spell out "Homecoming 1971" that was then turned into a billboard. Mr Winter, being a farm boy, provided a flatbed hay wagon and a tractor to tow the float in the parade. (There had been a devastating fire on the Winter farm the previous autumn; their home was lost but all their farm equipment was spared.) We pulled together some "period" costumes and the people riding on the float represented the early settlers of the province. (I didn't know then that my great-grandparents Mabel Shaw Cubitt and WJ Cubitt, and her father Albert Shaw had been among them!) The parade was a roaring success and we had a ton of fun building our contribution. We learned something about Saskatchewan history, but more importantly we learned teamwork and mutual respect. Who says education has to come from board-sanctioned textbooks?

Dance, dance, dance... Rock around the Clock

In 1969 a movie was released called They Shoot Horses, Don't They? It starred Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin and the backdrop of the movie was a 1930's era dance marathon. This movie finally found its way into the James Park Theatre in St Margarets sometime about the winter of 1972. Now, since there was really nothing to do in St Margarets most of the time other than go to each of the 3 movies screened in the station theatre, most of us did that for fun. This movie led to some very interesting experiences.

Most radar stations had a place for teens to hang out that was safe and handy that we called Teen Town. St Margarets had a small building right next to the outdoor skating rink that housed Teen Town. Someone donated a stereo system and we furnished it with old furniture that we collected from the curb on garbage day. We did some fun stuff, and hired a DJ for special occasions. But none of us had a large enough allowance to really pay much for our dances and parties so we had to come up with fundraising ideas. I don't know whose brainstorm it was to have a dance marathon but that's what we decided to do. (Actually, we had two of them.) I wasn't involved with the first one; I wasn't one of the "in" crowd, wasn't going to have a partner and just knew I'd never get anyone to sponsor me. It was held in the gym in the Rec Centre and lasted 18 hours. The money raised was enough to pay for a beach party at Loggieville. (I'll tell you about THAT later...)

When the success of the first marathon was noted, my Ranger company decided to take a chance and have a rock-a-thon to raise money for new uniforms. We borrowed a bunch of rocking chairs, got permission to use the gym and got our usual Teen Town DJ to agree to play some music to help us stay awake while we rocked. It only lasted about 12 hours but we raised enough money to get our new uniforms. Because there were no boys there though, it was pretty boring!

Our second dance marathon was even better than the first. There were a whole bunch of couples this time. Sharon danced with Bernie McInnis who had just had a bunch of dental surgery and was miserable. We had some couples from Chatham too; there were probably 20 couples who started out. I spent the whole time sitting with the DJ, who was by then my boyfriend. (Nobody noticed when we wandered outside to have some private time... Stairway to Heaven and In A Gadda Da Vida, you know...) The couple who won, Wally Nykolyshyn and Bonnie Stockill, lasted 24 hours! Wow!! Somewhere around here I have a picture of that event. I'll have to dig it out and add it.

I really think that we had a lot of advantages as children dependents of military members. Doing something like this would have been very difficult in another type of community. I'm glad I had the chance to be involved.

What doesn't kill ya

Kids do some really crazy things and I'm no exception to that rule. I think this time of year is when I tend to be my nutsiest too.

Way back in 1972, when I was still in Grade VIII with that horrible little man John T Cook for a teacher and right around this date, we went on a hike to Wine River. It was maybe a couple of miles out to the artesian well. We all packed our lunch and headed out the dirt road from the radar station into the woods. The weather in early May in New Brunswick isn't especially balmy, with the daytime highs usually in the 10-15 C range, but often dipping into the 0 range. On this day there was still ice on the pond near the well and some of us were able to see a beaver swimming around underneath it. The river flowed fast enough that the ice was gone from it. I don't know whose brilliant idea it was, maybe Eddie Sears', but there I was, swimming in the frigid water of Wine River in early May. Three or four of us went in wearing our clothes. That was the only time I ever went in the water there, but such a memorable swim. It was a REALLY long walk back to the townsite let me tell you, dripping wet and covered in gooseflesh. I wonder who else remembers?

... A little rain must fall

I'm feeling a little melancholy today after a really nice day with Sharon yesterday... perhaps it's a sense of anticlimax. Or it could be some other things that are preying on me. But somehow I can't dredge up a funny or happy reminiscence for today. What's coming to mind are the times I felt rejected, excluded, omitted, ignored. Inferior.

When we were kids I always felt like we were outsiders at any family gathering we attended, on either side of the family. Both grandmothers had their favourites and we weren't it. Perhaps it was because our parents were the rebels in their families, the ones that left the hometown behind to join the military, to have lives that were out of the family's sphere of influence. We almost always lived far away and were impoverished so visits were few. But even when we lived in the same town it was like we were just not as important as the others... add-ons. It's still that way and it has spilt over onto the next generation.

That sense of not belonging spilled over into other areas. I often felt as though I was a spectator, always on the sidelines observing others living. I had very few friends as a kid, spending a lot of my time reading, listening to music and teaching myself new crafts. Moving every couple of years as we did when I was a kid is really hard on someone who feels like people are only tolerating their presence and waiting impatiently for them to be gone. Whether it was true or not, it made the notion of making new friends in a new place almost torture. I still tend to hang back and watch how things unfold, only becoming involved when it starts feeling safe; I prefer the written word to face-to-face interactions. Perhaps that's why I'm so successful as a moderator on the website I work for: it's all at arms-length. I worry about meeting the other staff because I expect them to be disappointed with the reality of me.

It's ironic that I'm so introspective today of all days... my 51st birthday. Our personalities are shaped by the experiences of a lifetime, but none are as important as the early ones. Patterns develop that are very difficult to modify. Being given enormous responsibility at a very young age has made me tend to take responsibility for things that should rightly belong to others. It's a role I'm comfortable with, but wish I wasn't. I'm working on that. I need to start putting me first. I just don't know if I can.

Who needs TV??

My mom can't sing. She would be the first person to tell you that. When she was in school, they always had a Christmas concert and a spring music festival. She was admonished by the choir leader to simply lip-sync but not to make a sound. In an effort to include her in the festivities it was decided that she would do recitations. So she learned poetry and recited dutifully when her turn came. This "talent", if you will, came in very handy later on in life in a way no one would have predicted.

Most of our childhoods were spent in very isolated locales. Pinetree Line radar sites were isolated, it came with the package; fighter cops and later air defence technicians were stationed on radar sites and that was just how it was. With isolation came limitations on distractions and living on a radar site in Quebec came with the double whammy of poor TV and radio reception and the probability that the stations that were received would be in French. And so it was in St-Sylvestre.

Dad worked shift work; his schedule was the 6, 3, 3 and 3 variety: three days, three evenings, three off, three nights and three off. Many evenings when he wasn't home Mom would find herself reciting poetry while we ate supper to keep Sharon and me distracted from fighting with each other. One memorable evening it was raining and we had been cooped up all day. Recipe for disaster when you've got a five year old, a three-and-a-half year old and an infant. On this evening Mom recited Alfred Noyes' epic poem The Highwayman for us. Since she had dropped out of school in Grade IX, she must have learned it when she was about 14, but there she was, reciting it word-perfect for us much more than a decade later. The character of the poem and the language Noyes used were so evocative that I instantly loved it. It became a favourite and I would ask her to recite it for us again and again.

When the wind is a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
The highwayman came riding, riding, riding.
The highwayman came riding,
Up to the old inn door...

Mom, would you recite that for me just one more time?

Harbingers of spring

In your Easter bonnet
With all the fringe upon it
You'll be the grandest lady
In the Easter parade...

with apologies to Irving Berlin

When I was putting together the memory book for Mom and Dad's 50th anniversary I came across a picture of Sharon, Bruce and me taken at Easter... it must have been around 1965 or 1966, since Bruce was very small. Sharon wore a bonnet with a fair-sized brim and I a bandeau with organza flowers. Both of us also modeled our new spring coats. But Bruce... well he was the man with the GQ flair. He sported an off-white handknit winter-weight sweater and a fedora. (Yes, a FEDORA!) He looked like a Lilliputian Bing Crosby. All he was missing was the pipe.

I'll have to see if I still have the picture.

Saskatchewan needs child labour laws (and teachers need bells around their necks!)

Way back when we lived in that close-knit and self-contained community of CFS Alsask, my favourite place of all was the library. I had a library card almost from the minute the moving van pulled away and I devoured entire series of books; Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames were real people to me. Lorna Doone was one of the most tragic figures I'd ever "met".

The library was in the northwest leg of the H-hut that was John A Silver School (aka DND School Alsask). I visited at least once a week. By 1971, the library had outgrown the space; a portable was brought in and set up at the south end of the school to make room to expand. But how to get all those thousands of books from one end of the building to the other and into another building? Why not create our own version of a bucket brigade? Scathingly brilliant. The kids in Grades VII and VIII were enlisted to move the books. Who needs to have lessons and follow a curriculum when you can put all those kids to work? There were only about 16 of us, but that was enough. We passed piles of books down the hall into the waiting hands of the next kid all the way to the portable, where the librarian arranged them on the shelves.

That year we had two teachers: Mr George Proud, who was also the principal, and Mr Bill Winter who was in his first year of teaching and also taught part-time in the Grave V-VI class. Mr Winter was responsible for supervising much of the Great Library Relocation. One afternoon near the end of the project I was at the new end; we were moving the reference books... tons of encyclopediae... I can't remember whose idea it was, mine or Peggy Stewart's, but there we were, looking in the dictionary to see if they had an entry for the F-bomb. We were so intent on our quest that we didn't notice that Mr Winter had come up behind us and was looking over our shoulders. Thank heaven he didn't have the usual extension of his right arm (the yardstick) in hand or Peggy and I would both have been sporting some impressive welts! (Yes, corporal punishment was allowed in DND schools in 1971. I was intimately acquainted with Mr Winter's yardstick and so was Peggy.) We only realized he was there when he said, "Too bad you can't put that kind of enthusiasm into your English homework. Back to work!" Whew... we got off lucky that time.

I wonder where Peggy is now...

Today's a Two-fer: Family Vacations

When your family income is only just above the poverty line, family vacations aren't usually high on the priority list. However, when you have a Mom like mine, there will be memorable family vacations for which she scrimped and saved and did without to provide. One such was the summer I was 11.

My mom's maternal grandparents lived in Esquimalt, BC. They were getting on in years and none of us but Mom had ever met them. She really wanted to see them both again before age took its inevitable toll so she saved up all the tips she made while working in the restaurant of the Alsask Hotel to pay for a tent and gas. Then off we went to BC in our little red 1962 Comet. We found a campground about 17 miles from their home and staked out our vacation home then made our visit.

My great-grandmother Cubitt was a very strong-willed lady; Margaret Thatcher could have learned from her. Mabel Shaw was born in Nottingham, England and came to Canada with her father when she was 18. They sailed from Liverpool in the spring of 1911 then took the train to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan where they made their first stop. There she met and married my great-grandfather, WJ Cubitt. Their lives took them ever westward until they retired in Esquimalt. WJ was a slightly built man who was content to allow his Mamie to wear the pants, so to speak. He was born in the village of Dilham, Norfolk; he was the first of his family to emigrate across the pond, arriving in June, 1910. His brothers Jack and George followed in 1913, then his parents and two sisters in 1921. The three boys answered the call, enlisting in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and fighting the Hun in Europe during the Great War. All three returned in good health at the end of the war, picking up the threads of their lives again.

The Cubitts' house on Lampson Street was small and chock-full of treasures from "home". Great-grandma was a proper lady despite her working-class upbringing; she liked her china, crystal and silver flatware to be prominently displayed. My mother was very taken with the mother-of-pearl handled fruit knives and fish forks. (Who uses that?) Another thing Great-grandma liked displayed prominently were the results of her hobbies. She was a prolific needlepointer; there were pillows and tapestries everywhere, including a cushion that I can still see clearly if I close my eyes. The cover had a Union Jack in the background and a British bulldog in the foreground. It was incredibly detailed and flawlessly executed. Also quite conspicuous in their sitting room were the crocheted poodles! There were wine and liquor bottles disguised as crocheted poodles in every colour in every corner of the room. I went home with a white and pink one!

Great-grandpa Cubitt also had a collection of interesting memorabilia. We looked on in awe when he pulled out a cavalry sword he'd brought back from the war, then showed us the medals he'd been awarded for meritorious service. My favourite part though was when he reverently uncovered his mandolin, gently tuned it then treated us to a mini-concert of sentimental old melodies. His fingers were remarkably nimble for an 83 year old man. To this day my heart swells when I hear the sweet strains of the mandolin.

We were totally stunned when Great-grandma Cubitt died suddenly in October of that year. We had really thought she'd outlive Great-grandpa just out of sheer determination. He was bereft without her and followed her to the hereafter 10 months later. Somewhere I have a postcard he wrote to me the day before he passed that bears the postmark of the day following his death. And just last week my cousin offered me some pieces of Great-grandma's china. Are you KIDDING me? Bring it on!!


The following summer we took a family vacation that didn't include visiting relatives. My memories of that vacation are little vignettes, like a slide show or maybe a postcard collection. We left Alsask in the little red Comet, which really wasn't road-worthy but it was what we had, and headed southwest to the border crossing at Coutts, Alberta.

Our first stop was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a very accurately named town in my opinion. Our campsite was barely off the highway on an old riverbed. The soil was so silty it got into everything and I don't think that tent was ever the same again. We drove south through Yellowstone National Park where none of nature's wonders were in evidence that day. We wanted to detour to see Old Faithful, but Dad didn't want to take the time. (His philosophy is: decide where you're going and go there by the most direct route in the shortest possible time.)

The incongruity of the Great Salt Lake and the imposing grandeur of Bryce Canyon followed Yellowstone and then we were in the desert. We stopped for gas and a pit stop in Arizona then decided to get ice cream before continuing on. Mom discovered that she'd left her purse - with all our money - in the restroom at the service station. Just as she was about to lose her mind, a woman came up to her and asked her if she'd left her purse behind. Thank God for honest people! On we went to Las Vegas.

The time we spent there is a kaleidoscope of images: casinos, noise, heat, confusion. We stayed in a motel far off the Strip with a cracked and scummy pool; I scarcely remember anything more. Our travels took us to the southwest rim of the Grand Canyon. I was amazed to see people riding donkeys down a razor-thin trail clinging to the walls of rock, down into the base of the canyon. It was here that I first realized my fear of heights. Standing with my back to the railing of a lookout created such abject terror in me I could hardly breathe. Mom has pictures of us at that lookout, but I don't know that I could look at them. Then it was back to Vegas for another night before we hit the road again.

Our next stop was a campground in the Santa Ana mountains in California. It was very hot and dry; the fire risk was sky-high and there was an open-flame ban in the park. My only memory of that campground was of watching Mom shave her legs using a basin of water and Dad's old double-edged razor. The next day we drove into LA so that we could go to Disneyland. It was the summer that the Haunted Mansion opened and we took that ride twice, it was SO much fun. The parking lot held license plates from all over the world. I remember heat, sunshine and Tomorrowland. The following day we went to a beach so that we could swim in the ocean. Only problem with that was that it was a surfer's beach and the water was too rough to really swim in. Then it was time to go home.

The trip back was not memorable for anything except for the fact that the Comet was having problems fulfilling its role as family transportation. The starter went and the only way to get the engine started was to push the car until it reached a speed that it could be coerced into running. Mom, who didn't drive, push-started that car three mornings in a row; no one even thought to offer her a hand, except for a one-armed man who helped her push it up a little incline. Our last stop on the way home was in Great Falls, Montana. We visited with friends overnight and then were home the next night.

The Comet's days were numbered. There were just too many things that needed to be fixed. We really didn't need a car in Alsask because we could walk everywhere, so for months we didn't have a car. Not long before we prepared to move to New Brunswick, Dad brought home a Mercury Meteor. Finally there'd actually be room for three kids in the backseat! Hallelujah!! Our next road trip would be MUCH more comfortable...

Long ago and far away

I'm almost running out of day to get this entry in under the wire. Here's a short snapper:

In those early days when Dad was a temporary civilian, we lived in the booming metropolis of Grimshaw, Alberta. I believe I was not yet five when we moved there, a long way from St-Sylvestre in Quebec's Eastern Townships. At first we lived in one of the four apartments found in the village. (The building was white with green trim. We lived in a basement suite; Auntie Carol, Uncle Clayton and Kellie lived on the main floor. This interlude was brief... some shaky investments and poor business decisions led Dad to return to Brockville and to the rest of us to sharing a tiny, two bedroom house with Nan. Her house was very crowded with all of us there; the three of us kids shared one bedroom, Nan had hers and Mom slept on the couch. The house had no indoor plumbing. Nan had a one-holer in her room; we kids made do with a chamber pot at night but during the day we made the trek to the end of the garden to the outhouse. Drinking water came from a basin in the kitchen where a tea towel kept it clean and a dipper kept it sanitary. Waste water and other unpleasant things went into a slop pail that was emptied into the outhouse once a day. We were bathed once a week in the big washtub in the kitchen. Bruce, then the smallest, went first and I went last. The water would be warmed up from the kettle, otherwise we'd have turned blue along with the goose pimples. Now it all seems so primitive, but back then that's just how it was.

Nan had a house full of treasures. She loved fine china and had a collection of cups and saucers as well as a variety of cut glass serving dishes. All of her upholstered furniture had hand-crocheted antimacassars on the backs and there were doilies on every flat surface. Nan decorated cakes as a bit of a hobby, and sold some for extra money. I couldn't wait for my turn to have a birthday angel food cake with a Barbie doll standing in the hole, her hand-made dress spread out over the top of the cake as the main feature.

There are many other things worth remembering about the time we lived with Nan, but I'll save those for another day.

History is wasted on the young...

On my 8th birthday my dad spent the day with a recruiter for the newly amalgamated Canadian Armed Forces. At the end of the day he had re-enlisted and a new chapter of our lives was about to begin.

Dad's first posting after re-enlisting was to the radar station at Mont Apica, Quebec. This little community was smack in the middle of Laurentides Provincial Park and was little more than a wide spot to the west of the highway. The townsite was small, as were most radar station townsites; a number of duplexes and 4 three-storey apartment blocks were arranged on the south side of the station with the school at the farthest north point and the church at the farthest south point of the housing area.

But before we experienced all of this, we had the privilege of spending a week in a hotel in Quebec City. Dad was already at work in Mont Apica so Mom and the three of us kids were checked into the Chateau Champlain (now called l'Hotel Manoir d'Auteuil) in Quebec's historic Lower Town. Quebec is one of the oldest communities in North America and the first settled by the French in the New World. There have been French-Canadians living there continuously since July 3, 1608. The old city is on the flats near the St Lawrence River and on the bluffs of Cap Diamant, or Upper Town. The city is filled with historic buildings and old battlefields, rich with the stories of Canada's beginnings and Mom was determined to expose her children to this abundance of culture. Too bad we were just kids.

Poor Mom, she really had her hands filled with us. I was 8, as I've already explained. Sharon was 6, to be 7 in November, and Bruce was 3, to be 4 also in November. And we were cooped up in a single hotel room in a very old, very well-preserved hotel. There was no TV or Internet for us to be amused by, there was just Mom. It was already mid-September and the weather was starting to cool off. After breakfast every morning mom would get us all dressed in warm clothes and we'd go sightseeing. We had very little money so most of our excursions were to places we could enter or view at no cost. I don't remember how many times we climbed l'Escalier Casse-Cou (Breakneck Stairs), which have been in that exact spot since the city was first established, but I remember thinking that I never wanted to see another step again! (There are actually 28 different staircases between Upper and Lower Town and the change in elevation is 350 feet. That's a LOT of stairs.) I wish I could remember some of the places we went and the things we saw on those walking tours, as it's likely the closest I will ever get to Europe. I do remember the very imposing Chateau Frontenac that towers from the highest point on Cap Diamant. It's a 618 room hotel and is thought to be the most photographed hotel in the world.

I have been married for more than 30 years to a man whose ancestors were among the founding familes of the city of Quebec. Our children are the 12th generation of their father's family to live in Canada; the Fortiers arrived in Quebec in 1664 to settle first at Beauport, then on l'Ile d'Orleans in the St Lawrence River across from the settlement at Quebec. Antoine Fortier developed the first commercial fishery in New France and was very successful. Through marriage they're related to Louis Hebert, the first farmer in New France (arrived 1616) and to Abraham Martin (arrived 1619), thought to be the original owner of les Plaines d'Abraham, site of the defining battle in the war for control of Canada. Abraham Martin was my children's 11th great-grandfather and Louis Hebert their 10th great-grandfather.

The time I spent sightseeing as an 8 year old would mean so much more to me now as a 51 year old amateur genealogist!

Learning to Ski in Saskatchewan

Imagine living in a small town on the prairie where on a clear day you could see the grain elevators in the closest town 12 miles away. Alsask, a tiny little stop on the railway grain route to the ports of Thunder Bay and Vancouver, is one such little town. It sits barely a mile from the border between Saskatchewan and Alberta and there isn't really much left there any more since the dismantlement of the Pinetree Line of radar sites.

The radar station at Canadian Forces Station Alsask had 124 houses, all steel-locks (a euphemism for bargain-basement double-wide trailers), and a 15 pad trailer park. These steel-locks were all one of two designs, with aluminum siding and carports attached to the front or the side, depending on which model you had. They all were 3 bedroom, 1 bath slab-set homes and some families living in them had more children than there were rooms altogether. None of the yards were fenced except for the C.O.'s house. The school, K-8 in an H-hut, stood in the very middle of the townsite. The chapels were across the road from the school, Catholic on the west side and Protestant on the east. The swimming pool was in a building of its own, separate from the rec centre and the pool just fit in the space. Locally it was known as the Gopher Dip. The people who lived here were the men and women of the Cold War and their families. About one third of the population turned over each year during the Annual Posting Season and that's how we came to be there from August 1968 to July 1971.

Speaking of gophers, there were millions of them everywhere! And where there are gophers, there are gopher holes. More golf balls were lost in them than anyone would believe.

There were two trees, bristlecone pines that stood next to the guard house at the main entrance to the station. When we moved there in early August 1968, those trees were only as tall as I, a 10 year old girl. The main road, a big loop through the housing site, was paved but the little cul-de-sacs that sprouted off it weren't until that fall of '68. There were 6 houses on each of the cul-de-sacs; we lived in house # 122, on the very last cul-de-sac, between the Nowans and the Savages and across the road from the Pinders. Shopping was very limited; there was a tiny drug store and a small IGA in the village and an even smaller canteen on the station. If you couldn't get it there, you'd have to go to Kindersley, 40 miles to the east, or to Oyen, 25 miles to the west but much smaller.

Now I can hear you thinking, what ever does this have with learning to ski? Well, actually it has a lot to do with it. The people who were transferred to Alsask came from all over Canada. We moved there from Quebec and when we left, it was for New Brunswick. The same summer we moved to Alsask, another family moved there from the Ottawa area where the skiing was quite good. Sgt Dave McKinnell was a ski instructor and ski patroler in Ontario when he wasn't defending our country from the Russians and he had a real problem with the notion of living on a treeless, flat prairie for 3 years.

Dave spent the late summer driving up and down the rural roads of southwestern Saskatchewan looking for a hill. Or even anything that looked like a hill. One day he found one. It was not a huge hill, more like a dune, but it offered enough of an incline to at least provide a little momentum. It wasn't far from the station, about 10 miles to the southeast and the road was reasonably well-maintained. There was a spring on the property and a few spindly trees; close to the road was an old derelict house that had been the original homestead. The best part was that it wasn't cultivated, as was most of the land around it, and the owner was willing to lease the area for a nominal fee. The station commander agreed to support the development of a ski area at the Springs and so it began.

A shed located a short distance from the derelict house housed the old car that would become the motor for the rope tow needed to propel the skiers to the top of the hill. A half dozen or so power poles were erected along the path the tow was to take and the trails were groomed to remove rocks, fill holes and create a safer surface for the throngs of people Dave hoped would find their way to his little resort. The derelict house was cleaned up enough to provide a place to get out of the wind (which is relentless in Saskatchewan year 'round) and a propane camp stove brought out to heat water for instant hot chocolate. The station motor pool was tapped to provide a bus out to the Springs and back every Saturday and Sunday as long as there was snow on the ground, no matter the weather. The Alsask Ski Hill opened in early November 1968 and I was an inaugural member.

My parents were not well-off but they scraped up enough cash to buy skis, memberships and lessons for my sister and me. I was a real diehard and was there every single weekend; I loved it. My pants would be frozen to my legs, my hair matted to my head, my cheeks windburnt and frostbitten, my lips chapped and the tip of my nose totally numb, but nothing brought me down off the hill but the headlights of the 15 passenger bus coming down the road. I wiped out in spectacular fashion, came to sudden stops at the bottom of the hill where the hay from the bales keeping the snow on the hill sometimes blew, jumped and teetered on one ski but I never had so much fun in my life.

In 1970 the owner of the land agreed that the "warming hut" could be demolished and an A-frame "chalet" be constructed as long as it didn't cost him anything. Somehow Dave gathered the necessary funds to build it; it wasn't fancy, built as it was out of 2x4s and particle board, but it had a soaring wall of windows looking over the hill and electricity. By this time there was a small canteen there that sold coffee, hot chocolate, potato chips, chocolate bars and Hot Rods. When the power was turned on, we could have some space heaters and a place to actually get warm. But still, there was no phone. We were really cut off out there.

That same winter, Peter Berthiaume was the first real casualty of our little club. He had taken the gentle slope on the west side of the tow down to the springs and the little stand of trees. I saw him fall but didn't think too much of it. I was right behind him on the same run; as I approached him from behind him I noticed he wasn't trying to get up. When I called his name he didn't even look up. He was very pale and had a dazed look in his eyes. One foot was twisted at an unnatural angle. I skied past him, shucked my skis outside the chalet and started yelling for Dave. I grabbed the toboggan leaning against the chalet as I yelled, then turned and ran back to Peter, who still hadn't moved. I carefully took the ski off the foot that wasn't hurt, undid the runaway cable from the other one and reassured him that help was coming. As I tried to help him onto the toboggan several adults arrived on the scene and Peter was loaded up, hauled to Dave's car and taken off to Kindersley for treatment. I was 12 and had just handled my first emergency without falling apart.

The summer came and with it a move to New Brunswick. The McKinnells also moved that year and I have no idea what happened to the Alsask Ski Hill. I didn't ski again for 6 years but I've never fogotten learning to ski in Saskatchewan. Thank you Dave McKinnell, wherever you are.

Muddled Musing

I'm on an alliteration kick today it seems. ..

I received some unexpected feedback today regarding a little anecdote I related on another website, a simple reminiscence of a childhood pastime. Readers of my insignificant little story liked it enough to ask for more tales of my childhood memories. The result of that feedback is the decision to create this blog. If no one but me ever reads it, that's okay.

My earliest memory that is truly a memory is of winter night in Gander, Newfoundland. I couldn't have been much older than two. My dad was standing at the set tub in our basement at 116 Sullivan Dr, cleaning fish. I had an earache and my daddy was always able to make them go away. He hoisted me up to sit on the hot water tank so I could see what he was doing with those fish of his. I can see my pyjama-clad toddler self, sitting way up high with my ankles crossed and feet dangling, patiently waiting for all those fish to lose their innards. After he was done and had cleaned up all the guts, he took me upstairs to "treat" my earache. Sometimes he used warmed camphorated oil and a cotton ball to ease the pain. When we didn't have any camphorated oil (the odor of which I can feel in my nose as I write this) he would use a lit cigarette. [Stop shuddering, I still have both my ears. BUT!! Don't try this at home!!] The filter end went against the ear canal and the lit end went in Dad's mouth. He'd then gently blow warm smoke into my ear and like magic the pain would ease.

When it was my own turn to soothe small children with earaches, my choice of adjunct never included a lit cigarette. It leaned toward the more plebeian... Children's Tylenol and amoxicillin (or cefaclor for Adam and his resistant bugs!). Not nearly as memorable, but infinitely safer.